“Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.”
-Maya Angelou

“I cried, I cried… it was such an emotional experience and it wasn’t just about hair. It was what my perception of beauty was and had been for all of my life and then I look at myself in the mirror and I’m like, ‘That doesn’t look like what I thought was beautiful.’”
-Teyonah Parris on her reaction to going natural

“When I get up and work out, I’m working out just as much for my girls as I am for me, because I want them to see a mother who loves them dearly, who invests in them, but who also invests in herself. It’s just as much about letting them know as young women that it is okay to put yourself a little higher on your priority list.”
-Michelle Obama

“I’m glad that Shonda Rhimes saw me and said “Why not?” That’s what makes her a visionary. That’s what makes her iconic. I think that beauty is subjective. I’ve heard that statement [less classically beautiful] my entire life. Being a dark-skinned black woman, you heard it from the womb. And “classically not beautiful” is a fancy term for saying ugly. And denouncing you. And erasing you. Now … it worked when I was younger. It no longer works for me now. It’s about teaching a culture how to treat you. Because at the end of the day, you define you.”
-Viola Davis

“I am not my hair
I am not this skin
I am a soul that lives within”
-India.Arie

“Never in a million years did I think that I would see a young black girl wanting to look like me.”
-Janelle Monae

“The question why I would let Willow cut her hair. First the ‘let’ must be challenged. This is a world where women, girls are constantly reminded that they don’t belong to themselves; that their bodies are not their own, nor their power or self determination. I made a promise to endow my little girl with the power to always know that her body, spirit and her mind are her domain.” “Willow cut her hair because her beauty, her value, her worth is not measured by the length of her hair.”
-Jada Pinkett Smith

“No, I’m not the most beautiful person in the world. Some people think I’m ugly. Some people think I’m okay. You have to love who you are for who you are. I never knock people for their choices but I don’t ever want to augment who I am. What I look like and who I am was a gift from my parents and if I want to change that it’s kind of like slapping them in the face. I always want to be true to who I am because it’s my heritage. Even if it’s not the most beautiful, it’s history and my family history. Beauty is how you make people feel about themselves.”
-Whitney White (Naptural85), from an interview with KisforKinky.com

“My complexion had always been an obstacle to overcome and all of a sudden, Oprah was telling me it wasn’t. It was perplexing and I wanted to reject it because I had begun to enjoy the seduction of inadequacy. But a flower couldn’t help but bloom inside of me. When I saw Alek [Wek] I inadvertently saw a reflection of myself that I could not deny. Now, I had a spring in my step because I felt more seen, more appreciated by the far away gatekeepers of beauty, but around me the preference for light skin prevailed. To the beholders that I thought mattered, I was still unbeautiful. And my mother again would say to me, “You can’t eat beauty. It doesn’t feed you.” And these words plagued and bothered me; I didn’t really understand them until finally I realized that beauty was not a thing that I could acquire or consume, it was something that I just had to be.”
-Lupita Nyong’o

Conventional standards of beauty are designed to divide and injure. To the extent that beauty standards are constructed along racial lines, they are poisonous to women of color. I choose to define beauty as inner beauty; any other definition is useless to me. Whitney’s comments made me a bit sad. Although she’s saying that she is comfortable with falling outside of the norm, she seems to be implicitly validating comments about her not being beautiful. She should feel entitled to claim being beautiful if she feels that she is, not because society tells her she’s beautiful. Society may never validate… Read more »